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The thin edge of the wedge
June 01, 2001
Some weeks ago, when Mr Yet Ming announced his borrowing moratorium plan for which he received many kudos, someone asked "What is so brilliant about this plan?".
In response, among other things I said to the questioner on the online forum that this plan was nothing new or innovative. In fact, it was a cover version of the NAR's policy (urged on by the IMF and World Bank) and the PNM's plan to "regain credit worthy status" of a few years back.
The NAR described loan payments as "inescapable obligations" and proceeded to raise the money to pay the then spiralling debt by cutting back on public expenditure, particularly affecting social services, health and education. Then, came the massive assault on public service incomes to ensure that debt payments were made.
The NAR then removed 10% of public officers' salaries and proceeded to illegally halt the payment of increments to the 65,000 public officers again in the name of meeting the inescapable obligations.
The PNM trumped and followed suit with the refusal to engage in collective bargaining and the continued wage freeze in the public service while servicing debt to the local and foreign moneylenders.
The UNC after massively increasing the public debt with borrowings during the last and present terms have suddenly discovered that the debt stock is too high and hence Yet Ming's plan to stop borrowing (not completely though!) and PAY DEBT!
Inevitably, just like the previous regimes, the UNC was bound to meet these payments by applying the Chinese chopper against public service spending and against social services.
That is the anti-social offensive which all governments have pursued on behalf of finance capital for the last decade and more to ensure that the moneylenders are completely satisfied at the expense of the interests of the people.
And so it has come to pass, the new 'Chinee Chopper' announced the UNC's intention to again dip their hands in the pockets of public officers and more particularly civil servants in order to give the banks and lending agencies their pound of flesh.
In announcing their intention, he, as usual blamed the salaries of the public officers for the economic and financial troubles of the state and deflected blame from the real cause which is the fact that finance capital through usurious loan conditions exacts a heavy tribute from the whole of society which not even our great grandchildren will be able to repay.
He attached to the threatened retrenchment in the civil service to the possibility of pay increases as a result of job evaluation and restoration of the increments illegally stolen by the NAR, neither of which is an immediate prospect.
This is another trick to lull civil servants into a false sense of security, that the threat is not immediate. The experience of the past is sufficient to teach that once government's bent on satisfying the demands of their benefactors make such threats public the gilpins are already meeting the files and being sharpened.
Civil servants must immediately prepare themselves to launch a fierce struggle to defend their jobs and their livelihood and not be taken in by all the ole talk about "people power" over "money power".
It is precisely money power that the UNC, despite all the rhetoric, really represents.
HOMEPAGE
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